Obama's convention momentum hampered by jobs numbers

• First day of 2012 presidential race as conventions end
• Barack Obama and Joe Biden say they want to 'finish the job'
• Blow for Obama with poor jobs numbers for August
• US economy added only 96,000 new positions

Updated

The Obama family appears on stage at the Democratic national convention. Photograph: Tom Pennington/Getty Images

Romney on Afghanistan omission: 'I only regret you repeating it'

This morning Fox News' Bret Baier reluctantly asked Mitt Romney about criticism that he hadn't mentioned the war in Afghanistan in his convention speech.

It is difficult to quite make sense of Romney's reply. He appears to be accusing the media of fabricating a scandal where there is none. In any case his tone is defensive and derisive, insulted and insulting. But you be the judge:

BAIER: Do you regret opening up this line of attack, now a recurring attack, by leaving out that issue in the speech?

ROMNEY: I only regret you repeating it day in and day out. (LAUGHS)

BAIER: Well I mean, what just came from Charlotte -

ROMNEY: Because when you give a speech, you don't give a laundry list. You talk about the things that uh you think are important. And I described in my speech my commitment to a strong military unlike the President's decision to cut our military. And I didn't use the word troops, I used the world military. I think they refer to the same thing. And of course going to the American Legion the day before during the middle of our convention made a much bigger statement to our military and our troops than the President who did not go meet with the American Legion. I also spoke to the VFW the week before, so I think our American military understands that I am fully supportive of their effort. And unlike the President who we understand from Bob Woodward's book, at least from the excerpts, the President was and the White House part of the author of this sequestration idea that would slash our military. I oppose that idea, think it is absolutely wrong to cut our military as the President is doing.

Ann Romney refuses questions on same-sex marriage, birth control

Ann Romney has refused to state a position on same-sex marriage and on insurance coverage for birth control, saying the issues are not central to the election.

In an interview with KWQC in Iowa, Romney rejected the idea that some voters would take into account the Romneys' positions on social issues when deciding whom to vote for.

Q: "Here in Iowa, as you know, same-sex marriage is legal. Do you believe a lesbian mother should be allowed to marry her partner?"

Ann Romney: "You know, I'm not going to talk about the specific issues. I'm going to let my husband speak on issues. I'm here to really just talk about my husband and what kind of husband and father he is and, you know, those are hot-button issues that distract from what the real voting issue is going to be at this election. That, it's going to be about the economy and jobs. ..."

Q: Do you believe that employer-provided health insurance should be required to cover birth control?"

Ann Romney: "Again, you're asking me questions that are not about what this election is going to be about. This election is going to be about the economy and jobs."

Romney makes giant ad buy

The Mitt Romney campaign has announced a humongous ad buy in eight states: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and New Hampshire.

The campaign has cut 15 different ads, tailored to state and to issue. All the ads include footage from the Tampa convention. Here's an ad about the deficit set to run in Iowa:

Jonathan Chait thinks the fact that Romney's not running ads in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania should be a cause for concern among Republicans:

The reason this looks worrisome for Romney is that he’s pursuing an electoral-college strategy that requires him nearly to run the table of competitive states. The states where Romney is not competing (and which aren’t obviously Republican, either) add up to 247 electoral votes. The eight states where Romney is competing add up to a neat 100 electoral votes, of which Romney needs 79 and Obama just 23. If you play with the electoral possibilities, you can see that this would mean Obama could win with Florida alone or Ohio plus a small state or Virginia plus a couple small states, and so on.

Eastwood speaks

Clint Eastwood has granted an interview to his local paper in which he defends his speech at the RNC, saying he was speaking to undecided voters, not the left, and that the speech did exactly what he intended it to. Here's Paul Miller in the Carmel Pine Cone:

Eastwood’s appearance at the convention came after a personal request from Romney in August, soon after Eastwood endorsed the former Massachusetts governor at a fundraiser in Sun Valley, Idaho. But it was finalized only in the last week before the convention, along with an agreement to build suspense by keeping it secret until the last moment.

Meanwhile, Romney’s campaign aides asked for details about what Eastwood would say to the convention.

“They vett most of the people, but I told them, ‘You can’t do that with me, because I don’t know what I’m going to say,’” Eastwood recalled.

And while the Hollywood superstar has plenty of experience being adored by crowds, he said he hasn’t given a lot of speeches and admitted that, “I really don’t know how to.” He also hates using a teleprompter, so it was settled in his mind that when he spoke to the 10,000 people in the convention hall, and the millions more watching on television, he would do it extemporaneously.

“It was supposed to be a contrast with all the scripted speeches, because I’m Joe Citizen,” Eastwood said. “I’m a movie maker, but I have the same feelings as the average guy out there.”

"I know there's a lot of bad news out there," he said, but "America is gonna come roaring back."

Romney says he read the president's convention speech and found it disappointing. Now he is into his stump speech tally of promises the president supposedly has not kept.

"I was surprised by his address because I expected him to confront the major challenge of the past four years, which is the economy." Romney says Obama didn't talk about families struggling to make ends meet, which is inaccurate.

"You might have expected the president of the United States to lay out a plan to get the economy moving again... but he didn't, and that was surprising to me."

If you haven't read him yet, be sure to check out Gary Younge on the president's speech last night, which he calls "plodding" and "pedestrian":

His task tonight, though, was not to excite but to explain and engage. "You could not step twice into the same river," noted the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. "For other waters are ever flowing on to you." As Obama pointed out he is now the president, not a candidate, and the country's in a different place. Those looking for Obama's speech to match the impact of his convention address in Denver in 2008 were always in for a disappointment.

Back in Denver he could stand on his promise. Now he must stand on his record. He had to give a credible account of the last four years and make a case for the next four. Patience is a tougher sell than hope; endurance will always inspire less than change. He spoke not in terms of a grand narrative but discrete chapters: healthcare, women's rights, energy, educate, manufacturing, foreign policy.

How about that Biden?

People who thought Mr. Biden was little more than a comic sidekick to the president got a better look at the man tonight, witnessing a vice president who made a passionate and surprisingly effective case for his boss. The speech had its sentimental moments, and the occasional over-hearty platitude, but he made his argument in the appealing and populist way that often connects Mr. Biden with middle-class crowds.

Better than most speakers at the convention, he refuted the contemptuous Republican assertion that Democrats are constantly on the lookout for government handouts. People who need government help for a college loan or job training aren’t trying to become dependent, he said, they are seeking their own path out of dependency.

“That’s not how Americans ever looked at it,” he said. “What he doesn’t understand is all these men and women are looking for is a chance, just a chance to acquire the skills to be able to provide for their families so they can once again hold their heads high and lead independent lives with dignity. That’s all they’re looking for.”

Who won the battle of the conventions?

Which is why Republicans should be particularly glum this weekend. The further Democrats progressed into their convention this week in Charlotte, N.C., the more glaring the shortcomings of last week’s GOP convention became. By the time the last of the confetti fell on the Democratic convention floor, it became frustratingly clear that the most compelling speaker in Tampa, Fla., had been Clint Eastwood’s chair.

[...]

But while Obama said nothing new, he said it much better than when Gov. Romney said nothing in Tampa. And you could tell by the boisterous reaction of Democratic delegates who left the arena Thursday night looking fired up and ready to go. Maybe there seemed to be such a disparity between the two conventions because the Republican Party has never been the least bit excited about its nominee. Or maybe it’s because Democrats were simply blessed with a deeper bench of political athletes in 2012. But whatever the reason, Republicans were lapped by their rivals and may ultimately pay in November for botching Mitt Romney’s debut.

We're going to hit pause on the economics news for a moment and circle back to the president's speech last night. Most pundits are giving Obama a passing grade and no more. But the president wasn't talking to the press, Jonathan Chait writes:

The speech came, by and large, as a disappointment to political journalists and other campaign junkies. We have heard almost all of it before. The speech was probably aimed at undecided voters, who spend almost no time following politics. They received the paint-by-numbers outline of the election choice.

Mockery rather than anger. Ronald Reagan's "there you go again" line was so damaging against Jimmy Carter because it was amused-and-dismissive sounding, rather than angry at all. Obama managed to strike a similar "there you go again" amused/dismissive tone in talking about Romney's London-Olympic missteps and his team being "... new [after a pause, and with a grin] to foreign policy."

David Brooks thought the speech was too vague on policy. He does not draw a comparison to Mitt Romney's convention speech, which everyone understands to have been meringue-light:

The Obama speech offered some important if familiar hints of big policy ideas. There was a vague hint of a major tax reform. There was a vague promise to accept an agreement based on the principle of the Simpson-Bowles committee on deficit reduction. But it’s hard to be enthusiastic about President Obama truly championing initiatives that get no more than a sentence or a clause.

Dominic Rushe has spoken with Kevin Dunning, global economics analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit, who calculates that the US added an average of 87,000 per month between April-August – noteven fast enough to keep up with population growth.

"The poor jobs situation is being exacerbated by a contractionary fiscalpolicy," said Dunning. "Government has shed around 360,000 jobs since the beginning of 2011, of which a further 33,000 were lost in August."

White House: economy 'continuing to recover'

Council of Economic Advisers chairman Alan Krueger has released a statement saying "it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." Here's what he said:

Today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows that private sector establishments added 103,000 jobs last month, and overall non-farm payroll employment rose by 96,000. The economy has now added private sector jobs for 30 straight months, for a total of 4.6 million jobs during that period.

It is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is informative to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.

While there is more work that remains to be done, today’s employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

My colleague Dominic Rushe hears from the economists Capital Economics, in a note that sets out exactly how bad the jobs figures are when you look below the headline number:

There were plenty of other discouraging signs in this report, however, with temporary employment falling by almost 5,000 last month and average hourly earnings unchanged. Average hours worked was unchanged in August too, but only because July's figure was revised lower.

Despite all this weakness, the unemployment rate actually fell back to 8.1% last month, from 8.3%. But this was only because the labour force contracted by a massive 368,000, which dwarfed the 119,000 decline in the household survey measure of employment. Under those circumstances, it is hard to characterise the drop in the unemployment rate as any sort of good news.

'It is the economy rather than all the speeches'

My colleague Ewen MacAskill takes a broader look at the political implications of the jobs number, noting that the unemployment figure may be on track to dip below 8% by election day – but that isn't likely to help Obama. He also calls the president's failure in his convention speech to preemptively defend against the low number "a huge hole":

The unemployment figures at first glance look good for the Barack Obama campaign, down from 8.3% to 8.1%.

Maybe he is on track to get below 8% before election day, November 6, which would be a huge boost to his re-election chances? No: look beyond the headline figure and the news is mainly bleak, with only a relatively small number of new jobs being created and people who had been looking for work giving up and quitting the job market.

What it shows is economic recovery remains sluggish and that helps Mitt Romney.

For two weeks politics has been dominated by the party conventions. But it is the economy rather than all the speeches that is likely to dictate who occupies the White House next year. The Romney campaign, on top of all the money it is unleashing in anti-Obama ads, is banking on it.

There are two more sets of unemployment figures to be published before election day, the last just days before voters go to the ballot box.

Curiously, Obama had little to say about jobs in his convention speech last night. One theory is that he knew in advance that the figures would be bad. The White House insists that he only receives the figures at 8.30 am in the morning the same as everyone else, which is stretching credulity, the idea that the Treasury would not tip him off.

Whether or not he knew, it is a strange omission from his speech. It is the main concern of voters, the subject that could dictate the election, and it is one he should have addressed. Even if he knew the figures were bad, he could have attempted to argue that they would improve over time or make a case for more stimulus.

It was a huge hole in his speech.

Barack Obama accepts his nomination at the Democratic national convention for a second term in office. Photograph: Getty

How will 96,000 new jobs in August affect the race for the White House? A fair chorus at the moment argues that the number, while trailing expectations, isn't bad enough to be truly damaging, as a negative number would be (or as another number like June's 45,000 would be).

As far as the presidential race goes, however, there’s nothing here that changes the status quo significantly. Last month, before the report was released, I said that “anything between 50,000 and 150,000 is not a very big deal politically, and it would take either an actual negative number or something over 200,000 to really shake things up.” So this number falls comfortably within that “not a big deal” range. Moreover, the headline unemployment rate number fell a bit, from 8.3 to 8.1 percent, making this a more mixed and muddled picture.

The headline number came in a bit below expectations, but that’s probably just the noisiness in the data. The best hypothesis about the US economy this past year and more is that it has been steadily adding jobs at a pace roughly fast enough to keep up with but not get ahead of population growth. Today’s report was consistent with a continuation of that story. Nothing to see here.

Financial analyst Diane Swonk sees the number as a prod to the Fed to pump dollars into the economy – not a move likely to change the political dynamic but one that could spur business activity:

At first sight this jobs numbers are bad. At second sight they are even worse. As the Romney campaign was quick to gloat: "If last night was the party, this morning is the hangover."

The headline payroll growth of 96,000 is below population growth. The backward revisions for the last two months knocked the gloss off July's numbers and made June into even more of a stinker, taking about 40,000 combined from the two months. But worst of all was the hike in those who gave up looking for work and so dropped out of the labour force. That was why the unemployment rate dipped from 8.3% to 8.1%, for the wrong reasons. Total civilian workforce participation has now dropped to levels last seen in the early 1980s.

The Obama administration will cite the 103,000 growth in private sector jobs, because that's about the only number that sounds good.

The only other silver lining is that the shrinking workforce may propel te Federal Reserve to stop sitting on its hands and launch another round of quantitative easing, as early as this month. It will be too late to affect the election but it may improve morale in the meantime.

If last night was the party, this morning is the hangover. 43 straight months of unemployment above 8%. America deserves better.

(Romney? Hangover?)

Here's the full Romney statement:

If last night was the party, this morning is the hangover. For every net new job created, nearly four Americans gave up looking for work entirely. This is more of the same for middle class families who are suffering through the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression. After 43 straight months of unemployment above 8%, it is clear that President Obama just hasn’t lived up to his promises and his policies haven’t worked. We aren’t better off than they were four years ago. My plan for a stronger middle class will create 12 million new jobs by the end of my first term. America deserves new leadership that will get our economy moving again.

Our business correspondent Dominic Rushe has this first take on the numbers:

The number is far below economists' expectations and is a big blow to president Barack Obama. Earlier this week, a positive independent report had stoked expectations that August might have been a good month for US jobs. In July the US added 163,000 jobs and economists had been expecting that figure to slow to 125,000 in August.

The economy is the main battleground of the 2012 election and while the unemployment rate declined in the latest report to 8.1% it remains historically high and has been above 8% for three years, a figure unseen since the Great Depression.

Good morning and welcome to the first day of the rest of the 2012 race for president.

The economy created only 96,000 jobs in August, according to the just-released payroll report – falling far short of most expectations and miserably short of the symbolic 100,000 mark. Though unemployment fell to 8.1%, it's bad news for President Obama on a morning when he's hoping to find some momentum. We'll have more on that number momentarily. Meanwhile here's a look at where things stand:

•President Obama made his case for a second term last night in a convention speech that is being hailed as workmanlike, sufficient and somberly pragmatic – not the kindliest adjectives ever attached to the man's oratory. You can read the speech here.

•Vice-president Joe Biden won applause for a charged performance from the convention podium. The Democrats leave Charlotte with a sense of having discovered the new energy they were looking for; the question is whether there's enough gas in the tank to carry them through November 6.

•Obama chose the biggest night of his re-election campaign to defend climate change – and take a swipe at Mitt Romney for turning global warming into a laugh line in his convention speech.